Nick Drake
Place to be

"I was strong in the sun"... oh, how this phrase from “Place to Be” moves me, the song where the boy who had been hung on a star says "please put me down, find me a place to be"...where a gentle guitar, despite the tiredness, still insists on weaving very delicate webs...I don't think anything can be premeditated, but what move could be more fitting than that gentleness that slowly, slowly like a drop digs into you?... that gentleness that maybe is still a bit like that sun...that sun where we were strong...and that once again makes you say you've never heard anything so caressing and desperate...the old Robin was right, Nick's songs are butterflies tied to an anchor...indeed, despite the weight they still fly...and it doesn't matter if saying this makes me seem like an eighteen-year-old, also because maybe I am...which then even the vampire would say the same thing and he is terribly grown-up...and he knows very well that there's no place to be...very delicate webs we were saying, even without those usual complicated turns...here the guitar seems like one and not fourteen...and after all, this is just a little folk song, but of the palest blue...pale blue...that after the little sun phrase comes the "I'm faded like the palest blue"...and I don't think there exists in all great poetry a more perfect definition of sadness...even if definitions piss me off...even if more than faded it would be better translated as dimmed, or weak...maybe it's that my favorite shirt is blue and it is at least twenty years old....weak, faded, dimmed...and old..."when I was young, younger than the hill/I never saw the truth hanging from the door/now I'm older and I see it face to face/now I'm older and I have to clean up" these are the opening lines of the song..."I have to clean up"...after all, the “Explorers of the World” manual, during exploration number 34, asks some interesting questions like "what is the difference between what we choose to keep and what we throw away?...or “is what we consider useless without meaning?"...which is what this song talks about...then of course you can explore the world even from your own room, just like the vampire usually does, still the explorations remain the same, number 34, just like number 33, which I do not remember right now...they remain the same and they aim at finding that improbable “place to be”, namely the place where there resides “the possibility, a house more beautiful than prose” as Aunt Emily puts it, one who did several explorations starting from her own room...surely more than 34...and a beautiful exploration is the cover that the bearded Sam Beam does of “Place to Be”, that fellow who goes by Iron and Wine...slower, with sweet steel echoes and just a whisper of a voice...I got there thanks to Joe Burton, a guy we'll talk more about...that in this Drakian journey it's nice to take side roads every now and then...which must also be one of the explorations recommended by that manual...which was it?...71?...127?...